The Killing Harvest by Don Donaldson

Author:Don Donaldson
Language: ara, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BelleBooks
Published: 2014-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

21

SARCHI WANTED ALL this to stop. She wanted to go back to the way life had been before she met Latham. She’d tried to tell Pelligrino what Latham was doing, but he’d ignored her. Fine. She had no further responsibility in this. Let someone else take up the cause.

For the rest of that day and the next, every time she filled out a chart, she wondered if she’d ever see it again. And the thought of being in Koesler’s doghouse was enervating. When she left the hospital at the end of her shift, she was completely wiped out.

Arriving home, she found that, as usual, all of the workmen who were renovating the house next door had gone home. Before getting out of her car, she checked the surroundings for lurking figures. The Dumpster next door was a worry, but it was on the far side of the property, so anyone running toward her from behind it couldn’t surprise her. Still, she waited until another car came down the street before starting for the house.

Pushing her front door open a few seconds later, she smelled gas. Now what? Was Latham trying to blow her up?

She remembered an old warning: Never turn on a light switch in the presence of gas. So she immediately went back onto the porch. There, in the waning daylight, she tried to look up the number for Light, Gas, and Water on her cell phone, but for some reason she had no signal. So even if she could find the number, she couldn’t make a call. She went back inside, grabbed the landline phone by the door and the yellow pages in the drawer under the phone. Taking both back onto the porch, she soon had an LG&W rep on the line.

“Where are you now?” the rep asked.

“On my porch.”

“We’ll send an inspector right over. Wait nearby, but not in the house.”

Leaving the phone outside, she went back to her car and moved it across the street. In about ten minutes, with the sun now set, a white LG&W car arrived and parked at the curb opposite her. A young man carrying a toolbox and a flashlight that looked as though it would produce a beam he could climb, stepped from the car.

“I’m the one who called you,” Sarchi said, crossing the street to meet him. “The smell is very strong inside.”

Moving to the sidewalk, the inspector said, “Is the door unlocked?”

“Yes.”

“You wait here. I’ll check things out.”

He was gone long enough for the evening chill to creep into Sarchi’s feet. Then, through the storm door, she saw him flick on the living room lights. He came out and motioned for her.

“I found the problem,” he said when she reached him. “I’ll show you. Don’t worry, it’s safe. I opened the back door and aired the place out.”

Dropping her handbag onto a chair as she passed, she followed him through the front room, into the kitchen and to the closet by the back door where the heating unit was located.

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